ok but for real I am this close to putting “special interest” and “hyperfixation” on the shelf of “words the internet cannot use until they know what they actually mean” because I think everyone has somehow forgotten that ppl w autism / adhd can, in fact, sometimes just have normal interests also
i see a lot of posts like “it’s okay to have special interests that you don’t know a lot about/can’t infodump about!” and like yeah this can be true! one of my longest running sp/ins is something I don’t rly infodump about or retain information about because although I frequently research it and consume content related to it I just don’t retain that info for whatever reason. and people with collection related sp/ins exist who focus on collecting a category of items (I’ve known ppl who did this with stuffed animals or bottle caps, for example) or would rather collect merch for a media or band or what not than focus on the source material. these are ways special interests manifest! that’s normal! but then people take it way too far in that direction and I literally saw a reply on one of these posts that said something like “yeah one of my special interests is [show] and I don’t really have any urge to find out anything more about it I just like watching it sometimes” and like!! hey!! that’s an interest!! you just have a regular interest! you found a show you like and that’s great! but that is just objectively not what a special interest is!
the same sentiment honestly goes double for hyperfixations because hyperfixation requires a degree of intense focus on something for a period of time because that is by definition what a hyperfixation is so if you’re not. focused on or at all actually invested in an interest that’s just. Not a hyperfixation. you just found a thing you like. and that’s okay and great for you! just call it that!
tl;dr not everything an autistic person likes is a special interest and not everything a person w ADHD likes is a hyperfixation. sometimes neurodivergent ppl just Have Interests. and that is fine and normal we just need to learn what terms mean before we call anything we like ever a special interest please
Ultimately the debate over changing the minds of our oppressors with angry words versus kind words is meaningless because it rests on the assumption that people in power will be swayed by words at all. In reality, people who have power over you have limitless ways of tuning you out or reinterpreting your words to death. It's often the case that they won't actually hear you unless there are material consequences for not doing so.
Anonymous asked:
What does the arab in your carrd mean? Is it like afab and amab?
malewifenat answered:
.. i’m palestinian
SIGH
IT GETS WORSE WITH EVERY ADDITION
how does this get even worse
This is the internet now tho 😭💀
Omg so many additions since I last saw this post! 😂😂😂
It’s funny but incredibly telling how entitled/ignorant/insensitive some of these people are… idk if it’s an education gap or purposeful ignorance.
The really bewildering thing to me is that I remember when you needed to get up and pull a dictionary off the shelf, or visit a library to look up the facts you needed. Now people have all kinds of information literally at their fingertips and they can’t be bothered to use it.
Oh dear gods, it’s gotten worse
When you know politics but no facts
don’t take people too seriously on the internet
This hits different when combined with that “Americans don’t learn other countries exist till they’re in 5th Grade” post from the other day.
This is my favourite post on this website
I have literally had people tell me that I’m a gross appropriator for learning sign language while not deaf.
I sometimes cannot speak, but leaving that aside, what the FUCK lol
I still remember the guy who got mad at me because I spoke about the cultural role of the Norse gods in my life and my culture and insisted that I should be “proud of my Christian heritage instead” and quite simply would not believe me when I told him I was from Scandinavia because “that doesn’t exist anymore.”
I had a coworker with a mild version of all this who thought she didn’t have an accent. She (and presumably the people she had grown up around) were the only people in the world to speak the true standard english.
isn’t this boring? aren’t you bored of living virtuously for tiktok clout? don’t you want to go apeshit and read some Louis-Ferdinand Céline or, god forbid, Roald Dahl?
wait Roald Dahl is *harmful*????
He had some pretty antisemitic views, yeah, which I’m obviously not a fan of, but at the same time there’s something slightly bizarre to me about tiktokers publicly throwing out their beloved copy of Matilda because they 30 years after his death discover this fact and need to show all their followers that they don’t “support” him
Also, to clarify, the tiktoker quoted above wasn’t specifically talking about antisemitism, they were just going by some seemingly arbitrary list of “problematic” authors they found online, containing among others, Roald Dahl, Margaret Atwood, Sarah J. Maas, Isaac Asimov and Lemony Snicket
Ritually cleansing my bookshelf of problematic authors by dragging it to the nearest Catholic church and apologizing profusely while I feed it into a wood chipper during mass




































